News
Tesla sponsors sustainability project for church in Oakland
Tesla sponsored a sustainability project for the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California. The project required over 1,650 in person-hours to be completed. Additionally, the preparation, installation, and solar panels were valued at $720,000. The church noted that Tesla’s investment would yield more than $285,000 in electricity saving over the next ten years. This was Tesla’s first partnership in the nation to provide a church with solar panels.
“Tesla installed a new roof for our Family Life Center Gymnasium wing, solar panels, and power wall! It is our prayer that this large-scale project will encourage other churches to install clean and sustainable energy on their campus and continue the battle for environmental justice.”
“Our deepest thanks to Rob McCafferty, Zach Hill and the Tesla team, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Assemblymember Mia Bonta for providing gracious proclamations, and especially to our Trustees Ministry, Buildings & Grounds Committee, and Trustee Leonard Medley, who shepherded the project,” Allen Temple said on its Facebook page.
On January 15, Allen Temple held a dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new energy storage project at its Family Life Center in Oakland, California. The project, in partnership with Tesla, was completed on December 21, 2022.
The church said in a press release that Tesla’s sponsorship of the sustainability project would help it serve the community. These savings will enable it to direct more of its resources to community support and outreach. During power outages within its community, the Family Live Center will be continuously operational as a space for residents to receive services and support.
Reverand. Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson, who serves as Senior Pastor, spoke of the lack of equitable access to clean air, water, healthy food options, and clean energy for the Flatland communities in East Oakland.
“At the heart of the issue is access. Equitable access to clean air, clean water, healthy food options, and clean energy. But there is a growing movement in California and nationwide to provide this access in overlooked and underserved communities. Dr. Ambrose Carroll and Green The Church have stood at the intersection of the Black Church and this movement creating critical connections that promote sustainability,” she said.
“Tesla’s willingness to commit their time, talent, resources, and technology to projects in the community reflects the power and potential of business and faith-based partnerships. When equity and justice for all is the goal, we all win. I am thankful for the leadership and support of our Trustee Ministry in making this vision a reality. May this be the first of many.” she added.
Reverand Dr. Ambrose Carroll, the Founder and CEO of Green The Church thanked Tesla for its involvement in the community.
“We are thankful to see our friends at Tesla involved in work that empowers the community. Through this partnership with Allen Temple, Tesla has shown its desire to ensure that in the Bay Area, when it comes to clean tech, they want all boats to rise as the clean energy sector thrives. This project brings Allen Temple one step closer to being a ‘Resilience Hub’ for its community.”
“When the neighborhood loses power due to fires, rain, storms, floods, or earthquakes, this faith community can be ready to provide food, shelter, and health aid, all of which are standards for resilience. Gentrification and marginalization have drastically affected Deep East Oakland for a long time. The black community owns many faith buildings, some of which are storefronts and others great Cathedrals, and all these buildings across the country need retrofitting. Many, like Allen Temple, can and will become Resilience Hubs!”
Tesla’s Senior Global Director of Public Policy, Rohan Patel, said that he was proud of the Tesla partnership with Allen Temple and thanked Green The Church for helping it to make it happen.
Proud of this @tesla partnership with @allentemplebc in Oakland. Thanks @greenthechurch for helping to make it happen https://t.co/Ir4a79DxiZ
— Rohan Patel (@rohanspatel) January 21, 2023
You can view the photos from the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the gallery below.
[rl_gallery id=”229394″]
Disclosure: Johnna is a $TSLA shareholder and believes in Tesla’s mission.
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Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.